The development of various voice over IP protocols such as the H.323 Recommendation and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has led to increased interest in multimedia conferencing. In such conferencing, typically, a more or less central server or other device manages the conference and maintains the various communications paths to computers or other client devices being used by parties to participate in the conference. Parties to the conference may be able to communicate via voice and/or video through the server and their client devices.
Instant messaging can provide an added dimension to multimedia conferences. In addition to allowing text chatting, instant messaging systems such as the Microsoft Windows Messenger™ system can allow for transfer of files, document sharing and collaboration, collaborative whiteboarding, and even voice and video. A complete multimedia conference can involve multiple voice and video streams, the transfer of many files, and marking-up of documents and whiteboarding.
During a conference, a participant in the conference may use a computer or other client type device (e.g., personal digital assistant). The participant may receive or be confronted with multiple alarms or other notifications while participating in the conference. For example, the participant may receive a calendar alert, task reminder, urgent email alert, instant message alert, etc., each of which may set off an audible alarm on the participant's computer. Since such audible alarms may be detected or picked up by the computer's microphone, telephone microphones, Web cam microphones, etc., the alarms may be heard by other people participating in the conference or transmitted to the client devices used by the other people.
As such, there is a need for a system and method for one or more kinds of audible alarms or other alerts to be muted or otherwise disabled during a conference.